Events of the Research Group

The opening conference brought together scholars from different fields of the cognitive sciences in order to explore the interplay between culture and causal cognition. While different sciences investigate these topics respectively and in combination, the conference aimed at integrating the different approaches to develop a more complex (and complete) perspective on “The Cultural Constitution of Causal Cognition”.
Final Report

This workshop focused on causal concepts in illness and health. Researchers from psychology, philosophy, health sciences and anthropology investigated how lay people and experts explain illness, conceptualize healing and select interventions.
Final Report

The central question of the workshop was what it means for an agent to be the cause of an action: What is the metaphysics of the agent role in causation? How is this role mentally represented? What are the linguistic structures that express the agent role and how do they vary across languages? What can go wrong in representing the agent role, e.g., in psychiatric disorders? These questions were discussed by Scientists from different disciplines, ranging from Philosophy, to Psychology, Linguistics and Anthropology.
Final Report

Causal cognition is a fundamental cornerstone for understanding, explanation and prediction. But how much of this is universal (probably innate), and how much is culturally shaped and shared? In this workshop, scholars from cognitive psychology, developmental psychology and anthropology reported on state-of-the-art research on causal cognition and discussed possible "entry points" for culture.
Final Report

This workshop focused on the kinds of systematic data collections commonly used by cognitive anthropologists to study individuals’ knowledge of cultural domains and the analyses appropriate to these different kinds of data.
Analyses covered multi-dimensional scaling, hierarchical cluster analysis, and especially cultural consensus analysis.
The goal was for participants to learn why and how to do these data collections and how to analyze the data obtained using ANTHROPAC 4.983X.
Final Report

As the final conference of the research group on “The Cultural Constitution of Causal Cognition”, these two days bring together cognitive scientists from the fields of psychology, anthropology, linguistics and philosophy to explore the links between culture and cognition and to address empirical approaches in their study.